A Belgian Marketeer & Geek in Miami

How to face your Counterparts, from different country of origin ?

Every day, I have the chance to interact with people from different countries [mostly from U.S, Latin America, Europe and India] and this is true that some counterparts are more conflictual or more emotional. Most of the time, this is related to the culture from the country of origin.

Being Belgian, we can easily navigate on different patterns. Within our very small country, we have two cultures : one is more Germanic [North of Belgium with Flemish speaking people] and the other is more Latin [South of Belgium with French speaking people]. We are used in managing different cultures and languages in the same meeting.

Moving to an international function, it was clearly an asset as I’ve learnt so much from this pretty complex small country.

After some years in an international function, I’ve learnt much further on how to deal with different cultures and I still learn every day.

I like the chart below as this summarizes well the different patterns I had the chance to experience in terms of interaction with counterparts.